reading

Land for sale.
North West London.
Approximately 87.7 sq m.
Suitable for a Variety of Uses
(subject to obtaining all relevant consents).
Freehold Guide Price = £185,000.
TATJANA SCHNEIDER

Introduction

The Society of Interiors is a collection of essays that offer a theoretical, historical and practice-based analysis of the inexorable privatization of public life in the context of global urbanization. Experimental samples of alternative practices are explored that critically and creatively respond to the increasing commercialisation and privatisation of urban space. The essays investigate the role of the architect, artist, and designer in this era of financialisation and credit crisis, as futures are foreclosed by the infinite debt of repaying one’s loans. To counter the oppressions of the society of interiors, the design thinkers and practitioners here reflect upon and critique the contemporary condition, and propose alternative spatial, inter-relational, social and political adventures that potentialise ‘other’, alternative situations. Rather than being subsumed by our contemporary plight (which we sometimes mistake for comfort), and rather than giving way to a generalised melancholly, the practices discussed in this book aim to highlight how we can remain actively engaged in the production of a shared, common, and greater societal composition.

For more than a decade we have seen the emergence of alternative, often marginal, practices that operate at the periphery of what is commonly understood as an architect, artist or designer’s discipline and profession. The ability to work at the limits of one’s own professional capacities has seen the rise of ‘other’ hybrid and productively messy practices. While some practitioners operate primarily as individuals, others form temporary collectives and establish networks, building partnerships and relationships with local communities, establishing ‘new’ agencies in and for the production of public space. These practitioners are able to sustain their engagement in a complex environment defined by conflicting interests. However, their impact on the mechanisms of power at play are marginal compared to the vast majority of built production, the dominant spatial politics and the influence of financial players, including profit driven investment funds and the co-option of state responsibilities by private enterprise. While many alternative practices vociferously point toward pressing issues, and raise difficult questions, the ability and the power to create effective change would appear frustratingly minor and peripheral. Alternatives are only offered in homeopathic doses, while practices accept their marginal role and retreat into the murmuring complaints of discourse, often shared within small circles that are frequently lodged in the sheltered workshop of academia.

There is a growing sense of frustration and struggle, or else out and out exhaustion.

At a symposium on ‘Interiors and Cities’ hosted at one such institutional setting, Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design the discussion was concerned with the question of how the critical and creative practitioner could resist the sell out of public spaces. Where Tatjana Schneider addressed the London context and addressed questions of private ownership, Tor Lindstrand reflected on the infinite and empty reflections produced in the recently opened Mall of Scandinavia, leaving the panel and audience near the brink of an abyss of resignation, with just a remainder of frustration to keep them motivated. Much as we bear witness to the fallout of climate change, images of disaster fed to us through our televisual media, we have also come to realise that the death knell of public space has already sounded, and that we are powerless as a profession, and certainly as individuals, to reverse the development.

No, I don’t think so. Peter Lang reminds us of Superstudio’s radical architectures and utopian megastructures that overcome the dominant bourgeois model of ownership and society. Practices such as Petra Pferdmenges’ alive architecture have responded creatively to the challenges of the evacuation of public space by establishing a critical and inclusive design practice, engaging with local communities, but at the same time making efforts to change the political framework at a larger scale.

The complexity of the questions around the politics of urbanisation and the evacuation of public space requires a common effort in order to be able to achieve any change or improvement. The economic, social, and political situation of the world around us is a messy, entangled superimposition of a multitude of strata, composed of conflicting interests and contradictory meanings. While it might seem close to impossible to disentangle what is at stake, we need to be able to deploy designerly ways of mapping and knowing our urban environments if we hope to have a chance of addressing the issues we are confronting. The question remains as to whether a systemic change can be achieved and alternatives sketched out without being able to quite grasp what is confronting us. Who must we band together with? It seems obvious that small changes and experiments in and around public spaces that resist the plight of seemingly inexorable urbanisation can test and hopefully establish new strategies and tactics and offer inside knowledge that will enable us to respond to the imminent future in experimentally productive and life enhancing ways. They prepare the ground for a common effort that will enable us to achieve change or improvement, but we must also acknowledge that such work is necessarily undertaken collaboratively with a diversity of urban actors.

In my own work, within the broad array of practices related to the urban sphere, I have explored public space within both the educational as well as the research environment. In collaboration with students, and by challenging assumptions about the institution being a sheltered workshop, we have developed projects that explore the potential of unbuilt and immaterial architectures orientated around the intimacies of experiencing bodies in ephemerally produced interior and urban spaces. These explorations offer object lessons for how we habitually practice space, and how easily we fall prey to daily habits, the grinding circuit of consumption and production. From these earlier explorative projects I have shifted toward the exploration of relational urban actions, and subsequently toward a politically engaged practice that is responsive to encounters, that sometimes releases or even relinquishes control, and that ventures toward an expanded spatial and critical practice. Each experimental adventure aims to learn something, to carve out spaces of public expression that otherwise seem to be shrinking, or receding. In other words, the investigations I have ventured develop from discipline related questions of collective experience, to more socially and politically related questions of social interaction and socio-political acts, with the aim of challenging assumptions about ownership, resources and finances and how, instead, we can reinvest in the vibrant spatialities of a public sphere.

Because built form and civic architecture is not always the response to the pressing need of creating a space for a variable public this publication dispenses with the habitual emphasis on built outcome and end product. The emphasis shared by the collected essays is on the endurance of critical and creative practice, on open-ended investigations into the spatial production of public situations. Critical reflection across these essays is immersive and embodied and creative resistance is always urgent. Experiments in critical practice both challenge fixed disciplinary boundaries, while acknowledging the disciplinary capacity of a designer. In response to the specific and identifiable socio-political constraints of urbanization and its evacuation of a public sphere, novel collaborative and creative methods are presented as stories of embedded urban research.

If post-war social life was progressively overwhelmed by the consumption of spectacles, what Guy Debord once deplored under the rubric of the society of the spectacle, what we suggest comes next is the society of the interior and the limit condition of the complete evacuation of public life and its associated spatialities. The mise en abyme of simulacra, the short circuits of desire and lack wherein we feel we must have, must communicate, must capture and claim sovereign territory as our own, even if only via our social media feed, distract us from the challenges of attempting to practice together, to form public spatialities, even if just for the meantime. To disrupt the quiet comforts of the society of the interior becomes our contemporary challenge.

By extending the methodologies used beyond discipline specific approaches, the practices and the research collected within this book lead toward an exploration of the potential of urban actions and into what I have called architectural or spatial ‘activism’, the aim of which is to disrupt the deceptive quietude of our privatized spatialties and recover something of a critically engaged public mood.

Fig. 1: Multiple actors visiting the Josaphat site in Brussels, summer 2015. Photo: Hanne van Reusel.

Over the past fifteen years it has become increasingly common for local actors, artists and urban activists to occupy vacant sites in the city fabric prior to their top-down urban development. Currently, the best-known example in Brussels is the Josaphat site to the east of the region. The urban planning for the site was developed with no participatory process – apart from the organization of one information session about decisions that had already been taken. In contrast to that, several local non-profit organizations began activating the site by creating opportunities to generate encounter there, through initiatives including a vegetable garden and cultural events. The Common Josaphat Collective, in close collaboration with active local associations, is developing and promoting a more socially engaged vision that could be integrated into the transformation of the site. While such a message might get through to those who hold the decision-making power, the bottom-up appropriation of the public realm too often remains temporary, and its visions risk having a too limited impact on the development of the city.

By describing and reflecting upon two case studies that I developed through my Alive Architecture practice in Brussels, the first a bottom-up initiative and the second project developed within a top-down framework, I will describe how I overcame the divide between bottom-up and top-down urban planning in order to stimulate co-production of the public realm in Brussels.

In 2012, in the context of the 60th anniversary of Jonction, the Brussels north-south railway connection, I was invited, together with Stijn Beeckman and Barbara Roosen, to reflect on the neighbourhood of the Brussels red-light district. While Barbara developed several urban proposals for the Kwatrechtstraat, Stijn, together with a colleague, made a movie of the Kwatrechtstraat and the rue d’Aerschot. I concentrated on observing the existing urban situation in the street and the needs of local actors to gauge the possibility of improving the quality of life in the street through small transformations, three of which I tested through temporary urban actions. Our work was exhibited for three months in the Brussels art gallery Recyclart.

Fig. 2: In the Brussels red-light street, rue d’Aerschot, sex-workers advertise their services to potential clients in 58 windows.
Photo: Alive Architecture.

Besides the many windows in the street occupied by sex-workers advertising their services to potential clients, I noted the presence of many vacant spaces, eight of them situated at ground level along the 700-metre-long street.

Fig. 3: Observing the signs used in the ground-floor windows advertising for a ‘waitress’. Photo: Alive Architecture.

I set out to prompt an uptake of the vacant ground-floor spaces for enterprises or activities other than prostitution, in order to generate mixed use along the street. As I had neither a budget to activate the spaces myself nor a client willing to support and finance such a project, I borrowed the approach of the on cherche serveuse (Waitresses wanted) signs in the windows of the so-called bars in order to solicit possible uses for these spaces. Just as the existing windows use adverts to find sex-workers, I posted adverts to find people to rent the spaces (on cherche locataire) in each of the eight vacant ground floors.

Fig. 4: I placed signs on the vacant windows advertising for a tenant to rent this space. Photo: Alive Architecture.

I set up an email address which I placed on the signs, but I never received a single email. However, the initiative proved to be a successful way to engage with people directly in the rue d’Aerschot, especially with passing men:

‘This space is for rent? How much is it? I know a lot of people who are looking for a place in the area. Not necessarily to turn it into a prostitution salon, it could be something else.’ Kris, passer-by

‘Are you renting a space? I am very interested! This shop is not mine as I work for someone. If there was another ground floor I would like to rent it. Could you keep me updated?’ Singh, worker in a night shop, rue d’Aerschot

‘How much is the space and how big is it? I would like to rent a place to live. I don’t mind if it is on the ground floor.’ Ba, passer-by

Fig. 5: Drawing of potential client and interview with him. Illustration: Alive Architecture.

This and a number of other experiments allowed me to engage with numerous locals in order to find out about their desires for the rue d’Aerschot.

Based upon the needs that I identified, I developed eleven proposals to improve the quality of life in the rue d’Aerschot, Brussels’ red-light street, that could be realized through quick and cheap urban interventions. I staged three temporary events to test some of the proposals. One of these was the activation of the 400-meter-long grey wall in the street.

Fig. 6: View of the street with Emilie Haquin’s director, responsible for ‘prevention urbaine’, an agency which aims to prevent ‘problems’ in public spaces. Photo: Alive Architecture.

Fig. 7 (p.22): Interview with Emilie Haquin, translated from French into English. Illustration: Alive Architecture.

Fig. 8 (p.23): Activation of a ground floor space in the Brussels red-light district. Photo: Rirbaucout Collective.

Introduction

Inclusive City-Making